So, to put it another way, the wage hasn’t increased much, in some sectors, since Robert E. Howard was writing, and food hasn’t gotten cheaper.

I’m surprised to see Universe’s rates are what they are — those are good. Thanks for posting those, Jeanne.

Jim Baen’s Universe for example pays well.

• For the first 5000 words, we’ll pay 25 cents a word. That comes to $1,250
• For the next 5000 words (i.e., from 5-10K), we’ll pay 15 cents a word. That comes to $750, or a cumulative payment of $2000 for a story that was 10K words long.
• For the next 10,000 words (i.e., from 10-20K), we’ll pay 10 cents a word. That comes to $1000, or a cumulative payment of $3000 for a short novella that was 20K words long.
• For the next 20,000 words (i.e., from 20-40K), we’ll pay 8 cents a word. That comes to $1600, or a cumulative payment of $4600 for a short novel that was 40K long.
• Anything longer than that, we’ll pay 6 cents a word.

You actually don’t get the money immediately through Amazon: it’s delayed 60 days. PayPal/e-Junkie is immediate.

@Paul H:

My agent joked about that (getting his commission), but it’s a fair question.

@Leigh:

I was answering question asked. Clearly, literary magazines have long served as calling cards for writers. But my belief is that once upon a time, it was possible to make one’s living as a short story writer. And that doesn’t seem possible with today’s market.

On to the real question, the most I have ever been paid for fiction was $0.25/word, for a 2,000-word story published online. They accepted nothing longer than 2,000 words. To be clear, though, Fiction I Have Been Paid For is quite a small sample.

By comparison, a novel can be any length, but advances may or may not have anything to do with length. Consider the 100,000-word novel that gets a (fairly frequent) $10,000-15,000 advance. That’s $0.10-0.15/word against royalties.

Dan Baum’s tweets were a great read, but they demonstrate how The New Yorker and Rolling Stone are not examples that mean a lot to many working freelancers or fiction writers. As John Hodgman once said, we rent our clothes.

The New Yorker doesn’t buy stories, it publishes writers.

I’m sure your breakdown of the fees paid to writers is useful to aspiring writers, but it misses the point of short story publishing for the author. Most short story writers don’t publish those stories in order to make money. The short stories are the equivalent of loss leaders for novels and publishing them in magazines — even The New Yorker — are, first and foremost, forms of publicity.

My wife is a literary fiction novelist who has had stories published in several literary journals. Those publishers paid little, but the exposure was critical to her early success. For example, one of the first stories she wrote was published in a well-regarded but low profile journal that paid little. However, that story was selected for the anthology Best American Short Stories (where she has since appeared two more times). That is a huge honor for an up-and-coming author and an accolade that the rest of the literary community notices.

Even when she had a story in The New Yorker last year, she benefited more from the exposure in the form of the magazine’s huge readership, than she did from the money (though that was great, too). The story was an excerpt from a novel that was released about a month after the story appeared and I’m fairly confident that the magazine’s readership gave the book an initial sales bump that it probably wouldn’t have received otherwise.

But honestly I guess I sorta picked one of the worst professions to try and get in, no one really cares about writers unless you’re already recognized. Then the obvious problem, “how to get recognized”, like being a dog and chasing your own tail. I guess I could have just tried to be an engineer, but I’m not complaining really because if I didn’t try and get my stories out from my head I’d proly just go crazy and eat all my shirts, something like that.

Great article John.

Hats off to you John for giving it a go. One would hope that all those people who bought via Amazon would come back to you and buy any other short stories you offer up directly rather than paying the 66% of their purchase price to Amazon.

The more I see of this, the more I think we need to get organised and get our platform sorted to allow all writers of short stories a place to sell their short stories – established and emerging writers alike, where the money goes back to them rather than lining the pockets of overbloated and “overpowerful” corporations.